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How Twitter Users Balanced the Budget
- richcollins 16y agoNotice that those favoring tax increases are consistent except expiration of tax cuts for those making under 250k.
- hugh3 16y agoYes, interesting. One might almost cynically suggest that they're in favour of all tax increases as long as they're paid by somebody else.
- andrewcooke 16y agoRational self interest in economics? How un-American.
- harisenbon 16y agoI perhaps am not understanding the graph completely, but doesn't that just mean that they are in favor of having the rich pay more taxes and the poor (or upper-middle class. 250k is nothing to scoff at) pay less taxes? Sounds perfectly logical to me. Also, 250k? I WISH I made 250k.
- anamax 16y agoThe $250k is per family - it's $200k for single folk. $250k/couple is two folks making $125k. Talk about a marriage penalty....
- afshin 16y agoMarried couples are allowed to file separately if they wish.
- anamax 16y ago> Married couples are allowed to file separately if they wish. Filing separately doesn't help in this case - the brackets for for "married filing separately" are at half the married filing jointly income levels, so our $125k/person couple would pay the same rate separately as they would filing together.
- JoachimSchipper 16y agoI wonder why the NYTimes only publishes this data for Twitter users. It's not like it would be hard to store it for everyone...
- simonk 16y agoAt the end you could start over and do it again. If you published to Twitter the could count that as 1 person, you may of done it on the NYTimes site 5 or 10 times before doing that though.
- zbanks 16y agoIts easy to scrape the data post mortem from twitter users, since NYT gave them specific links. I imagine they didnt think to record users data until it was too late: twitter happened to have a log available.
- donohoe 16y agoJust a guess - but might have gone against the privacy policy. At no point did it mention it would collect and aggregate data. But once you tweet it then it's in public view then... Plus it's easier to map 1 verified twitter user to a real person.
- laujen 16y agoI find it interesting that no radical approaches were asked. I wonder, for instance, how people would feel about a VAT tax or flat income tax.
- natrius 16y agoThe only proposals for a "national sales tax", which was listed, have been VATs.
- philwelch 16y agoI think it's a good choice to only allow non-radical options. Everyone knows that going full-tilt libertarian and making spending cuts that would never even conceivably pass would eliminate the deficit; it's more realistic and illuminating to see what can be done within the realm of the possible. "Politics is the art of the possible." --Bismarck "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." --John Kenneth Galbraith